Another option maybe for the child processes not to write to the database at all (especially in the case with
logging) and for the parent to dump the data into the db at regular intervals.

Well, this may be an option, but it's probably not a good
idea. You'd hate to have a bunch of inserts or updates
queued in the parent and then have that process
go down before it can finish the queue, or find out that
the connection dropped for whatever reason since the last
time it processed a queue.

Has anyone (esp. Marcello) seen data about how much it costs
loadwise to have a bunch of child connections? My own
(anecdotal, not systematic) experience has been that the
number of connections is less important than what those
connections are doing. If the SQL demands of any one
process are heavy, having more than a couple going at once
will hurt, no matter how you do it. If it's easy stuff, then
number of concurrent requests is not much of an issue.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other